Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/02/world/02terror.html

On Sunday, officials in Qatar said in a statement that “the explosives discovered were of a sophisticated nature whereby they could not be detected by X-ray screening or trained sniffer dogs.”

Bomb Plot Shows Key Role Played by Intelligence

By MARK MAZZETTI, ROBERT F. WORTH and ERIC LIPTON

In the middle of last week, a woman who claimed her name was Hanan al-Samawi, a 22-year-old engineering student, walked into the U.P.S. office in the upscale Hadda neighborhood of Sana, Yemen’s sprawling capital city. She displayed a photocopied identification card, and dropped off a bomb hidden inside a printer cartridge with a Chicago address listed as the package’s destination. A few blocks away, another package concealing a homemade bomb was dropped off at a FedEx office, also seemingly headed to Chicago.

Within days, the two packages had advanced through four countries in at least four different airplanes — two of them carrying passengers — before they were identified in Britain and Dubai after an 11th-hour tip from Saudi Arabia’s intelligence service set off an international terrorism alert and a frantic hunt.

Investigators apparently sought near-simultaneous arrests to avoid the risk that one arrest would warn other suspects, even though the plots were unrelated, McCaul said.

By TODD GILLMAN / The Dallas Morning News
http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/latestnews/stories/100209dnmetterrorplot.1d6dd1732.html

WASHINGTON — Federal authorities told key members of Congress on Thursday that there is no connection between a plot to blow up a Dallas office tower last week and other terror schemes disrupted at the same time in New York and Illinois.

“That was asked very directly, and they were very definitive,” said one of the lawmakers with access to classified intelligence, Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Austin, after a briefing from FBI and Homeland Security officials.

Jordanian citizen Hosam Maher Husein Smadi, 19, was arrested Sept. 24 and accused of plotting to topple the 60-story Fountain Place building. Explosives and a detonator supplied to him by undercover agents were only simulated, authorities said.